Artisan Video Was From the Current Build

Posted By: September 11, 2010

@Diablo answered a question about how recent the Artisan video was.

Say, Bashiok, how long before Gamescom was the Artisan video made?—Grug16

A couple weeks.—Diablo

Besides the non-gamer time issue (this @Diablo tweet went up at 6:18am, California time!), those two words pack a lot of newsworthy-ness. We fans never really know just how current the info we’re seeing is, after all. Most game companies are always racing to keep up, and to get the newest additions into a build. I remember conversations with Blizzard North guys back in the pre-D2 days, when they were virtually comatose the first day of E3, after spending the previous 48+ hours working non-stop to get everything new into the show demo, and fixing most of the crash bugs hiding within it.

Happily, that hasn’t always been the case with Diablo III. I talked to Leonard Boyarsky at Blizzcon in 2008, and he told me that the demo build was months old. I found that interesting, as well as encouraging; it made it seem like they were ahead of schedule, and let me know that there was a lot of developed game stuff not in the demo.

As for the recent Gamescom video, we knew that at least some of the Artisan stuff was very newly-developed; Jay Wilson talked about the backstory for the Mystic still being under construction, and we saw that the Monk’s relaxed, in-town stance wasn’t implemented yet. This tells us nothing about progress on the rest of the game, or how far ahead the team is on preparing the Blizzcon 2010 demo, but at least we know roughly where they are on Artisan development.